6 ms·

The quoted words search barely works these days anyway.

by bmurphy1976 2y ago

mrandish 2y ago
Amazon Search joins the chat...
roskelld 2y ago
This bugs me so much. It happens constantly. A few days back I searched for a person's name, put it in quotes and I got results with celebrity with somewhat similar name. Zero hits on the person I searched for on the front page. I had to add specifics to the query such as job title to find them.
- userbinator 2y ago
  An easy way to see how a "search engine" has become "vague recommendation engine" is to take a distinctive phrase from one of its results, put it in quotes, and see if it manages to find that page again. Often, it doesn't.
  - jxramos 2y ago
    that's an excellent verifiable test! I've been struggling to articulate the behavior too, advertisements and slanted search results have effectively gotten in-between my information retrieval and being steered to products and services. It's so hard to find what I'm looking for a times I often just give up and move onto something else.
- mrandish 2y ago
  Amazon Search is now nearly completely useless for any kind of targeted search. Heaven help you if you're looking for a product without a certain attribute most other products like it all have. There is quite literally no way to filter results against one attribute. Even if Amazon has that product, you won't be able to find it. I eventually just scripted a separate search engine query that's site specific to Amazon. It works but not as well as it could because it doesn't have access to my purchase history or Amazon's hidden granular category taxonomy.
  - ninkendo 2y ago
    Oh my god I ran into this yesterday. I wanted a very specific kind of underarmour sweat pants. It gave me every other company competing with underarmour and a bunch of things that are not sweat pants. It’s like they’re not even trying to do “search” any more, but instead just feed your search string into their ad auction system and give you the results. There’s just no way to actually get a specific thing.
    - mrandish 2y ago
      I've slammed headfirst into this wall of infuriating frustration dozens of times. Just trying to find a particular kind of LED bulb that has the feature of being dimmable. Any attempt at searching for that term returns all of the bulbs which helpfully mention "Not Dimmable". And there's no way to exclude that string. It's maddening because Amazon used to have a modern, reasonably capable search function. You could require terms. You could exclude terms. Terms could be phrases. I'm sure they still have all these capabilities, they've just decided to intentionally disable them because their A/B testing indicated that breaking their search would return a fractional percent more revenue by shoveling more unrelated results in front customers. It must work on someone but it's never worked even once on me, because I KNOW what I need and I'm only going to buy exactly that - if I can fucking find it. I'd actually be okay to let Amazon annoy the NPCs who just clickety-click and buy whatever random shiny shit they shovel in front of them, IF they'd just add something for us technically-minded, engineering type people who are looking for one precise thing only. They can even hide it behind an arcane interface like REGEX. That'll keep the rabble out! :-)
  - rendaw 2y ago
    I'm not sure if this is just amazon japan or what, but amazon japan will not only show you things that you didn't search for, it will actively rewrite your search query into a query for those things to gaslight you into thinking you typed it in wrong. And if you try to change the text back it replace it again! On top of all the other insane choices they made, like removing your search category restrictions if it thinks your query was too precise. I'm close to snapping.
  - kartoffelsaft 2y ago
wahnfrieden 2y ago
intext: works
nixonpjoshua 2y ago
I haven't had quotations work for me in search in years now, it's really sad how boolean operators have stopped working too. I find it particularly difficult to search for "non latex" products as adding quotes on the total term no longer works and I just get products full of latex. Also I can't use boolean search to find the product because it just ignores the "-" in front of the word and gives a ton of results that match the search term latex. Just an example where it isn't just making it harder to search for a profit motive but it's actually actively preventing (both Amazon and Google) from showing me the results or even ads for the product I actually want to buy. If anyone has a good solution to this I would appreciate it, there is often a non-latex version of most all latex based products but finding them online is impossible if you don't already know the brand name!
- joshuaissac 2y ago
  You can put Google Search into Verbatim mode (via Search tools) to make it respect quotation marks.
  - saint_yossarian 2y ago
    TIL, thanks! The corresponding query parameter seems to be "tbs=li:1", if anybody wants to make this the default.
  - b112 2y ago
    Sadly that is broken too, I find. I think it's doing some aliasing still, and other things.
- _kb 2y ago
  Try using `-Lamport` to filter the latex results.
- rdiddly 2y ago
  Maybe use the name of whatever the substitute is, like nitrile butadiene?
- oefnak 2y ago
alex1138 2y ago
It's not hard to make a search engine that respects '+' Unless your new upstart social service is called SearchEngine+ so you remove it (Except duckduckgo also seems to semi-ignore it. I'm baffled. I give up. I'm throwing my computer out the window, and moving to the woods)
- yegg 2y ago
  Hey, we had fixed a lot of syntax issues a while back, so happy to look into this if it is still messed up.

The quoted words search barely works these days anyway.

Amazon Search joins the chat...

This bugs me so much. It happens constantly. A few days back I searched for a person's name, put it in quotes and I got results with celebrity with somewhat similar name. Zero hits on the person I searched for on the front page. I had to add specifics to the query such as job title to find them.

userbinator 2y ago
An easy way to see how a "search engine" has become "vague recommendation engine" is to take a distinctive phrase from one of its results, put it in quotes, and see if it manages to find that page again. Often, it doesn't.
- jxramos 2y ago
  that's an excellent verifiable test! I've been struggling to articulate the behavior too, advertisements and slanted search results have effectively gotten in-between my information retrieval and being steered to products and services. It's so hard to find what I'm looking for a times I often just give up and move onto something else.
mrandish 2y ago
Amazon Search is now nearly completely useless for any kind of targeted search. Heaven help you if you're looking for a product without a certain attribute most other products like it all have. There is quite literally no way to filter results against one attribute. Even if Amazon has that product, you won't be able to find it. I eventually just scripted a separate search engine query that's site specific to Amazon. It works but not as well as it could because it doesn't have access to my purchase history or Amazon's hidden granular category taxonomy.
- ninkendo 2y ago
  Oh my god I ran into this yesterday. I wanted a very specific kind of underarmour sweat pants. It gave me every other company competing with underarmour and a bunch of things that are not sweat pants. It’s like they’re not even trying to do “search” any more, but instead just feed your search string into their ad auction system and give you the results. There’s just no way to actually get a specific thing.
  - mrandish 2y ago
    I've slammed headfirst into this wall of infuriating frustration dozens of times. Just trying to find a particular kind of LED bulb that has the feature of being dimmable. Any attempt at searching for that term returns all of the bulbs which helpfully mention "Not Dimmable". And there's no way to exclude that string. It's maddening because Amazon used to have a modern, reasonably capable search function. You could require terms. You could exclude terms. Terms could be phrases. I'm sure they still have all these capabilities, they've just decided to intentionally disable them because their A/B testing indicated that breaking their search would return a fractional percent more revenue by shoveling more unrelated results in front customers. It must work on someone but it's never worked even once on me, because I KNOW what I need and I'm only going to buy exactly that - if I can fucking find it. I'd actually be okay to let Amazon annoy the NPCs who just clickety-click and buy whatever random shiny shit they shovel in front of them, IF they'd just add something for us technically-minded, engineering type people who are looking for one precise thing only. They can even hide it behind an arcane interface like REGEX. That'll keep the rabble out! :-)
- rendaw 2y ago
  I'm not sure if this is just amazon japan or what, but amazon japan will not only show you things that you didn't search for, it will actively rewrite your search query into a query for those things to gaslight you into thinking you typed it in wrong. And if you try to change the text back it replace it again! On top of all the other insane choices they made, like removing your search category restrictions if it thinks your query was too precise. I'm close to snapping.
- kartoffelsaft 2y ago

wahnfrieden 2y ago

intext: works

nixonpjoshua 2y ago

I haven't had quotations work for me in search in years now, it's really sad how boolean operators have stopped working too. I find it particularly difficult to search for "non latex" products as adding quotes on the total term no longer works and I just get products full of latex. Also I can't use boolean search to find the product because it just ignores the "-" in front of the word and gives a ton of results that match the search term latex. Just an example where it isn't just making it harder to search for a profit motive but it's actually actively preventing (both Amazon and Google) from showing me the results or even ads for the product I actually want to buy. If anyone has a good solution to this I would appreciate it, there is often a non-latex version of most all latex based products but finding them online is impossible if you don't already know the brand name!

joshuaissac 2y ago
You can put Google Search into Verbatim mode (via Search tools) to make it respect quotation marks.
- saint_yossarian 2y ago
  TIL, thanks! The corresponding query parameter seems to be "tbs=li:1", if anybody wants to make this the default.
- b112 2y ago
  Sadly that is broken too, I find. I think it's doing some aliasing still, and other things.
_kb 2y ago
Try using `-Lamport` to filter the latex results.
rdiddly 2y ago
Maybe use the name of whatever the substitute is, like nitrile butadiene?
oefnak 2y ago

alex1138 2y ago

It's not hard to make a search engine that respects '+' Unless your new upstart social service is called SearchEngine+ so you remove it (Except duckduckgo also seems to semi-ignore it. I'm baffled. I give up. I'm throwing my computer out the window, and moving to the woods)

yegg 2y ago
Hey, we had fixed a lot of syntax issues a while back, so happy to look into this if it is still messed up.